Journey to the Virtual World

Tag Archives: upgrade

Just a few months after the 6.1 release, the product team has released vRealize Operations 6.2. You can find many articles about it by bloggers, such as one this and this. Someone going with the YouTube ID of VirtualXpress IN has even done a video on the upgrade.

Check the known issue here. Also, check the relevant KB, such as this one. For my case, the disk space looks relevant, so I ensure I have enough space first. There are a set of issue on cluster management, none relevant for me as my customers find vSphere HA as sufficient. For an environment with <5000 VM, I think a single node is sufficient. Speaking of high availability, I’d rather have 1 vRealize Operations VM protected by SRM then 2-node cluster without SRM.

Take note of the “Redirecting syslog files to the Log Insight feature also redirects garbage collection files” issue. While I have sufficient space in my Log Insight instance, I do not want it to be cluttered with information that I do not need.

There is an issue with Report Template tab toolbar in using IE 11. In general, I avoid IE for vRealize Operations as I’ve seen the performance delta.

The Release Notes provides tips that if you have a remote environment in which the latency is > 20 milliseconds, you should install a remote collector. I prefer to deploy an appliance instead of Windows as remote collector so I can stick to just 1 common platform for vRealize Operations.

Here are other known issue from the Release Notes that I’m taking note, just in case I see them in my engagements.

Metric for Outstanding I/O requests might be inaccurate on some object types
The datastore|demand_oio metric that appears as Datastore|Outstanding I/O Requests in the UI, might be inaccurate for the vCenter Server, Datacenter, Cluster, and Datastore object types. Due to the method used to calculate a weighted average of transactions and the latency of transactions across hosts, the value of this metric might be artificially high.

Deselecting Read permissions for Resources and Dashboards has no effect
When you create a user role with no Read permission for Resources and Dashboards, the user can still see the dashboards and all resources on the home page. Object Relationships page is always visible to the user with or without any permission.

A PDF report file might not include all data from a widget that has a scrollbar

BTW, I’m upgrading from 6.1 Patch. I no longer have earlier edition running around 🙂

The screenshot below is to show you that the upgrade process picked up when I forced stop the upgrade process as I thought it hang. Glad to know it was able to pick up! I clicked Finish installation button.

It took me to this screen, which is by now a familiar screen if you have done multiple update. The keyword here is OS. You need to update the SuSE Linux first. Tomas Baublys wrote a good guide here.

If you leave the browser screen alone, it will timeout after several minutes. Don’t worry, you can log back in and see that upgrade is on-going.

In my case, it was just a 5-10 minutes, and it’s done. This is what it looks like.

Once the base SuSE Linux is updated, time to update the vR Ops application. I shared the process to update from version 6.0 to version 6.0.1 here, and from 6.0 to 6.1 here. The process to update to 6.2 is the same, so kindly review the above. No need to fill the Internet with duplicate info 🙂

11 February 2016 update: There is a patch release called 6.2.0a. See the release notes here.

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vRealize Operations have 3 forms, which explains the 3 different downloads.

Virtual Appliance.

Linux installation

Windows installation.

The first one is what I recommend, hence I showed them as bold green line in the diagram below. The diagram shows the 3 choices of deployments. After you deploy 6.1, you should deploy the Hot Patch. Once you complete it, then you should deploy your solutions (it’s called Management Packs).

The patching comes in 5 forms, hence there are 5 different installers for you to choose. You just need to pick 1. Hopefully the above diagram helps you pick the right one.

By now, quite a number of customers are already using vRealize Operations. The upgrade path is different. You first upgrade your management pack. The Horizon View 6.1 solution for example, does not support vRealize Operations 6.1, 6.0.3 nor 6.0.2. Because it was released before any of these versions.

So you first upgrade your V4V from 6.1 to 6.2. V4V 6.2 is supported on vRealize Operations 6.0.

For those celebrating Christmas, have a blessed Christmas. For those who aren’t, have a well deserved break.

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I’ve been waiting for the 6.1 release, so I’m glad to see the announcement on my inbox this morning.

I shared the process to update from version 6.0 to version 6.0.1 here. The process to update or upgrade from 6.0.x to 6.1 is the same, so kindly review the above. No need to fill the Internet with duplicate info 🙂

If you have customized the content that vRealize Operations Manager provides such as alerts, symptoms, recommendations, and policies, and you want to install content updates, a best practice is to clone the content before performing the upgrade. In this way, you can select the option to reset out-of-the-box content when you install the software update, and the update will provide new content without overwriting customized content.

The above is the reason why I advise customer to always clone. You then prefix the cloned object with your company name. If the object is a personal object, then prefix it with your initial. If your company name is Super Duper Transparent Inc, then prefix the object with SDT will help you quickly identify them in the sea of objects. I found it useful as I can sort by name. For the personal object, I prefix all mine with e1, so other users will not be confused.

Tomas Baublys corrected me that I missed the Linux OS update. He has written an excellent guide here.

As shared here, the upgrade is identical. So I will just provide additional screenshots here. The first step is to upload the .pak file. It can take a few minutes.

Once it is uploaded, click Next to proceed.

The upgrade will automatically log off (as the system is down, obviously 🙂 ). It takes minutes, so go and get a cup of coffee 🙂 You can review the progress from the System Status and Software Update links on the left side of the screen. Below is the System Status menu.

…. and here is the Software Update screen.

Back from your coffee break? You should see something like this at the end.

The Release Notes states that “After an upgrade, the vSphere Web client might not display Health, Risk, and Efficiency badges for a machine that vRealize Operations Manager is monitoring. If that happens, use the Solutions page in vRealize Operations Manager to re-register vRealize Operations Manager with your vCenter Server”.

From the screenshot above, you know it did not happen to me. It’s happily collecting already.

Once upgraded, it’s now ready to get visibility inside the Guest OS! I’ve written some articles to help you started: